Saboteur!…

[Video][Website]
[5.33]

Anthony Miccio: Girl, I don’t even have the boner. Snap!
[3]

Matt Cibula: “But Mr. Cibula, I thought you hated all quirky Euro-songstresses!” “Not all, Sparky, not all. Just the boring ones.”
[8]

Anthony Easton: I can imagine this being sung by Sammi Smith on Porter Wagoner c. 1965 or Bobbie Gentry at the Opry c. 1976, or Dusty at the Horsehoe just after she broke up with Carole Pope — that high camp melodrama that uses artifice to push every real feeling into a proper weeping earnestness.
[9]

Melissa Bradshaw: This sits strangely among the album’s phantasmagoria, difficult to believe given much of the introverted hallucination that surrounds it. It sounds like an unlikely fantasy of relief. When you hear this song on its own, though, you can ruminate for hours on what it means to rock-gospel the house classic, and put emotion and a strange clenched jaw into it. The Todd-the-god-esque xx remix is another story again.
[9]

Chuck Eddy: The xx remix is yet another reason to hate those lifeless losers, but the original… well, the original was apparently by Candi Staton, though I’d never heard of it before now. Just checked it out: it’s no “Young Hearts Run Free” or “Victim” (both 10s), but probably worth an 8. Florence’s remake had struck me as a useless Winehouse move already, but seems even lamer up against Candi’s. In the context of her own fair-to-middling album, I actually prefer the single’s other side (“Dog Days Are Over”), not to mention whichever track has the Bo Diddley beat — not to mention the CD cover, which looks a lot like something my wife’s old band the Color Guard would have come up with.
[5]

Martin Skidmore: I was ready to hate this, as Candi Staton generally and the Source record are huge favourites of mine. It’s hard to think of many things where an indie cover would be less welcome. However… well, no, it really is almost as painful as I expected, though both the playing and most of the singing are more or less okay, even good by most indie standards. She does sound awful when she puts some welly into her voice, though.
[3]

Ian Mathers: It goes almost without saying that Florence isn’t the vocalist that Candi Staton is, but she acquits herself honourably enough here. And while the Machine can’t equal the widescreen, wide-eyed feel the Source created so effortlessly, they do just about the best indie rock circa 2009 version of the tune you could imagine. But it’s not as if it’s hard to get your hands on the song that Florence and the Machine is covering here, and other than chopping the track down to about half its length it’s hard to make out why they bothered if they essentially weren’t going to change anything.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: Functional and pretty neat along with it, in the sense of answering the never-asked question of what it would sound like if decent indie girl rock critical darlings did disco classic and didn’t completely root it up. Florence wails nicely, the Machine faithfully recreate the lines, if not the textures, and the original is still lots better. And Florence’s own “Cosmic Love” just sits there begging for release – this already came out as a B-side, and that’s probably where it should have stayed.
[6]

Alex Macpherson: Of the regrettable wave of quirky British females this year, Florence is about the most inoffensively ignorable. Here, though, she reaches several thousand miles beyond her capabilities and possibly breaches a fair few moral boundaries in braying “You Got The Love” over a plodding soft rock backing track. When it’s over, I half-expect the video to cut to the horrified faces of Dannii, Cheryl, Louis and Simon. Sadly, there is no option of voting Florence out of our lives by the following day.
[1]

Iain Mew: The first time since “Dog Days are Over” that I can at least see the point of Florence. Her performance is always so overpoweringly melodramatic that just about anything else gets in the way; keeping everything else bubbling along (comparatively) smoothly rather than the kitchen sink overload of the last couple of singles is a marked improvement.
[5]

Alex Ostroff: Lungs is, quite unexpectedly, one of my favourite albums of the year. Grounded by Florence’s indomitable voice, infatuation and heartbreak are granted apocalyptic gravitas. Such is her talent that it seems perfectly reasonable for the sheer force of her emotions to blot out the stars one by one. In the context of the album, “You’ve Got the Love” is a brief moment of uplift finally granted after twelve tracks of drumming, drowning and drinking. Taken on its own, however, the song is simply upbeat, failing to communicate desire or need half as effectively as Florence’s darker and more desperate moments. The new mix for the single release is an improvement, giving the vocals space to breathe, but the Machine have produced far better.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: Yeah, it’s a solid enough cover, I suppose, but I don’t get why everyone is so excited about Florence and her Machine. This is just kinda there. Her voice doesn’t do anything exceptional, and, well, there was a lot more going on when, say, Klaxons covered Grace’s “Not Over Yet” (to name another rock-ish-band-covering-dance-classic). This makes me wanna hear Candi Staton, not more of FATM – and with each listen, it gets more dull.
[4]